There have hitherto been developed a variety of automatic analysis apparatuses for analyzing a biological body fluid such as those as referred to above in order to obtain various useful information on the health of patients.
In these automatic analysis apparatuses developed in recent years, however, there is an increasing trend to deal with many test items by the use of a single automatic analysis apparatus in a short time and thus the appararus has been made more complicated in construction, larger in size, and higher in production costs and processing speed.
For this reason, many medium- or small-sized hospitals such as regional hospitals, practicing doctors or the like, not requiring so many test specimens and/or test items, have no strong need for installation of such large-sized and high-performance automatic analysis apparatus for themselves, and therefore, it is the general practice for such hospitals to forward test specimens such as blood to specialized test centers equipped with such large-sized and high-performance analysis apparatus for required testing such as blood analysis thereof for their own patients.
In these circumstances, whenever an emergency occurs in which urgent tests are required in the regional or medium- or small-sized hospitals having no automatic analysis apparatus, emergency test specimens have to be forwarded to the specialized test centers for biochemical or serological analysis thereof, and much time is thus needed until the results of such analysis are obtained. As a result, there often arises a problem in that one can not timely gain analytical data necessary for an operation on a patient and one has to defer the performance of such an operation, thus resulting in a waste of time and money.
Moreover, in many conventional automatic analysis apparatuses of the kind above described, reaction vessels and/or stirring rods are reused after being cleaned and hence provision has to made for cleaning devices for cleaning the reaction vessels and/or stirring rods each time a predetermined work is finished. This results in problems that the entire automatic analysis apparatus is further made greater in size, more complicated in construction and higher in production costs. In particular, in case of an immunological analysis, reuse of reaction vessels and/or stirring rods is liable to cause a problem of cross contamination due to insufficient or incomplete cleaning thereof.
In order to prevent such a cross contamination, it is effective to use reaction vessels and stirring rods of the disposable type, but in this case, the manufacturing and running costs thereof will increase to a material extent. In addition, it is necessary to manually set them in an automatic analysis apparatus in an appropriate manner and such manual steps are extremely inefficient and cumbersome.
Further, in automatic analysis apparatus in general, all kinds of reagents used will not be consumed uniformly and there will be a great difference in the consumed or reduced amount (i.e. the rate of reduction in volume) between reagents frequently used and those of infrequent use, as a consequence of which it is difficult for an inspector to visually check the volume of a reagent in each reagent bottle in order to ascertain that an appropriate volume of the reagent not less or greater than a suitable range is retained therein. Thus, reagent control is very difficult and troublesome.